Perhaps the GA code isn't executing in time?  Do you have a slow loading page?  Where is the GA tracking code placed within your page?

The numbers shouldn't be that far off, that's for sure.

You must look at ranking in the SERP's as a popularity contest, so-to-speak.  Backlinks by way of websites and social mediums are votes and can/will determine your placement in the search results.

Your chosen keywords/phrases might be extremely competitive, as well.  When starting out with a site, it's best to select some niche, lower volume keywords, which are often more long-tail than the aggresive, highly-competitive 1-3 word keyphrases.  Trust me, going for the gusto right off the bat will only leave you more and more frustrated as the years go on.  You can always adjust your keywords down the road once you've established a good roll of backlinks and visitors to continue being more competitive.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post today, don't just focus on Google.  There are other search engines out there as well, and you'd be making a large mistake in focusing solely on Google for SERP's as Bing/Yahoo holds a decent market share, too.

Keep trucking.  SEO is an art-form.  It's not something just anybody can do on a whim and expect to get to #1 overnight.  It might be wise to invest in an SEO team to help get you pointed in the right direction.

• Marc

Yes to your first questions.  Here's the process for each (as I see it):

1. Fix/remove the ability for system to generate ?print URL's and implement canonical tags; open beer and wait 'til search engines sort things out.  Nothing more you can do here.

2. No fix to system so we still have ?print URL's.  In this case, setup the 301's in your .htaccess file; however, as long as the system is still generating these ?print URLs, you will have to keep the redirects in the .htaccess in tact, permanently.

Untested:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^([^/]*).html?print$ /$1.html [L,NC,R=301]

Always optimize for the user, not for the bots.

What I mean by that is, create titles that are typically phrases that make sense to people as they'll be more willing to click on that result within the SERP's.

The title tag is simply just a one-liner of what the page is about, just in a catchy way.  If it looks/sounds robotic, people will notice, and in turn, crawlers will notice.

To fully answer your question: unique is always better.  Creating custom title tags whenever possible, outside of the template, robotic style, will warrant you better results.

I am yet to find any harm in these (assuming you don't post to ones that carry bad links, ie. outbound links to gambling sites, xxx sites, etc).

If link directories were so bad, how come some of them are as respected by Google as they are (PR7/8/9's).

Just don't go overboard, and don't expect a whole lot from them.  Get your keywords right, and use approx. 10 different keywords/phrases throughout.  Also throw in your brand name as a set of anchor text.

So, let's say you found a package to submit to 1,000 directories.  Chop that into 10 different anchor text's (max, and 10 might be pushing it), so you'll now get approx. 100 links to different pages of your site with different anchor texts.  And don't forget to use your brand name for 100 of those.

Like you said, every time I do research on competitor's backlinks, they always, and I means always, have thousands of links in link directories, and are top 3 in the SERP's.  So I have found it hard to believe that it's a bad practice, even though every SEO guru on the planet will try and tell you otherwise.